Nowhere in the world has industrialism achieved such a complete victory as in England. Here alone do we see a Society which exists entirely by and for a cosmopolitan market, and which has lost the last remnants of economic self-sufficiency. And the disturbance of social equilibrium is the more profound because the England of the past was, more perhaps than any other country in Western Europe, an essentially agrarian State. The changes which have made English society and civilization so entirely different in type to anything that exists on the other side of the Channel, in so far as they are not attributable to religion, are mainly due to the peculiar course of English agrarian history.

During the Middle Ages the English countryside, with its open fields cultivated in strips and its wide stretches of common and forest, must have presented very much the same appearance as the neighbouring districts of the Continent, and at the same time England was socially a province of Christendom, sharing in a common civilization, a common art, and common political institutions. The Reformation, however, and the rise of the new landlord class, which had no real parallel in any of the continental countries, launched England on a new path.